How to Unpack and Boot the Demo Image - the hard way

Format the SD card using mkcard.txt. For example: sh mkcard.txt /dev/sdX, where X is the drive letter of the SD card. On systems like Ubuntu that would look like 'sudo sh mkcard.txt /dev/sdX'.

Copy MLO, u-boot.img from http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/ to the first partition

Unpack the tarball to the root partition of your BeagleBone SD card.NOTE: superuser privileges are required when unpacking the image so that
device nodes can be created on the SD card filesystem.
eg. for Linux:

This assumes that the SD card has the root filesystem (ext3) partition mounted
as /media/rootfs.

Ensure all SD card filesystem operations have completed (ie. filesystem cache
has flushed to SD card) and eject the SD card from your development
machine. Most operating systems have a "Safely Remove" action to
perform this from the Desktop.

Insert SD card into BeagleBone and power it up.

What to Expect

Watch the serial port output. You should observe the following:

The U-Boot startup.

Kernel uncompresses and boots.

Lots of kernel messages for up to a minute while filesystem scanning happens
and the system boots.

At the end you should see a login prompt below the Angstrom ASCII-art
logo. The root password is empty (just press enter if asked for a
password). You can now login to your new Angstrom demo system.

What If...

My host computer doesn't recognize the BeagleBone serial port!
The standard driver doesn't recognize the vendor and product IDs, so it needs to be manually modprobed:

modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x0403 product=0xa6d0

What Next?

Once you have a working Angstrom system you may want to connect it to: